Five Years and New Swag!

ReNew Homes is entering our fifth year of operation. Time flies when you are having fun!

(We love Dwight).

Sometimes, it's hard to believe we've been doing this for five years - and other times we can hardly remember our old life of corporate jobs  (although we fondly remember the steady paycheques!)

We're celebrating the milestone with new swag and a bit of a re-brand of ReNew Homes. When we started out, we did a quick cheap and cheerful logo design using an online logo service. It did the trick and we thought we were pretty cool when we had t-shirts made!

But we are older and wiser now and ready for a new look and feel. We wanted something brighter and better. Presenting, our updated and refreshed ReNew Homes brand!

Here's our new sign (we have little ones, too, for smaller areas..)

We have new business cards:

And no re-brand would be complete without wearable swag - t-shirts, hats, sweatshirts, golf shirts etc. We grabbed some dry-fit shirts for our team to wear - which should be a good thing in the hot, humid Ottawa summers. (But also .. toques for the team ... because we still haven't forgotten the frigid winters).

What do you think of our new look?

Extraordinary Exteriors

At ReNew Homes, we are big on exteriors. I have a history of walking around neighborhoods admiring homes I love from the outside (and occasionally doing some imaginary re-arranging for those homes that need er.....a tweak).

Colour, texture, fit with the surrounding homes, balance and landscaping - are all important considerations for a great looking home. Curb appeal is a big draw, and you can see why, it's your home's first impression! See? Here are some lovelies ...

There are all sorts of options when considering your exterior. This post is a run down of a few we've worked with successfully.

Wood. We first used wood in our first contemporary home. It was a good balance to the metal and stone that formed the rest of the home's exterior. Marine Board is often used in many contemporary projects. It's pricey, but really lovely. The first example is a bit out there, but the wood is a strong enough hue to balance the blue ... Marine board is nearly indestructible, given it's used for boats!

In the home we built below, we just used cedar planks, stained to the desired colour. Cheaper, but would need re-staining after a few years.

Because we tend toward more contemporary styling in our projects, we also use a lot of metal. It's practical, inexpensive and comes in a huge array of colours. One of our recent project used red metal to clad their addition and the results were wonderful. The red just really kicked off the brick, grey and black colours.

Corrugated metal and other types of profiles create great texture and again - colour. It's also on the cheaper and maintenance-free side of things, always a bonus. You can see the metal used here, against brick this time, on the back of our current home. This time the wood was a lighter shade. The metal we chose was a medium charcoal grey. I like them together.

Here's wood, brick and a bit of metal, again, this time on on the front addition of our current home. (The back addition is charcoal grey corrugated metal).

Brick is great, by the way, especially on older homes, or on those in a more traditional style. It's pricey though to work with especially from scratch. I also find it can sometimes look harsh unless it's mixed with softer or brighter colours. There are also so many shades of brick. The solid reddish brick and dark brown brick can be nice, but the pink and orange tones (like our current house, above) can be a bit yucky. I had to try hard to counter the brick colour with the mixed textures and the teal blue doors. It's not my favourite, but ya gotta work with what ya got.

The house we are re-doing currently is also a pink brick colour and to make things worse, the bricks are in bad shape. So we're opting to paint the brick a soft taupe colour. It's not often done - in fact, this is the first time we're doing it. There's a maintenance side to painting brick, but our painter tells us most good paint jobs on brick will last up to 15 years. In this case, we needed to fill in some doors and windows and matching bricks of this vintage are difficult to find. We have a bricklayer extraordinaire, Joe, and he tells us a match would be impossible. So, paint it is!

In another post, I'll cover stucco, cement board, siding and other finishes. Time to move on to
the "fun stuff" - the decorative touches that really finish the outside of a home.

Aside from the "big decisions" around exteriors, there are many smaller touches that feed into the final result. Front doors are huge for me. Look at these classics. Black is a perfect front door colour. But here it's also about the lighting, the planters and simple things like a great door mat with the homes address included.

But I always like a pop of colour. The next few are utterly charming and welcoming, They say "Come in! There are fun people living here, probably drinking wine!" (Or at least that's what I imagine..)

You gotta scramble a few eggs to make an omelette ....

We're busily tearing apart the house across the street .... There are currently four rooms on the main floor - we'll be creating one big kitchen/dining/family room - and adding a powder room. We're also creating an old fashioned "coat room" off the front entrance. (Remember those from school?) We are big believers in the importance of transition spaces. 

SO many clients tell us a mudroom - a spacious, organized space for coming and going ... is high on their wish lists. Who wants to live like this?

Unfortunately for present day families who love older homes .... they weren't so big on transition spaces in the good old days. We always have to move things around to make it happen.

Here's a glimpse of the main floor now as it is with some demo underway. We've had to peel back the lathe and plaster (and layers of pink paint) to reveal the stare of the structure beneath. We'll need to be able to show our engineer what's holding up the few walls we are leaving in place. (With the help of a beam or two)

We also made a bit of a discovery- this fireplace, hidden behind a closet on the main floor. Surprise!  We're going to try to tweak the kitchen design to see if we can do a bit of a work around. (I am not so sure ..)

And this is the third floor. Formerly a one bedroom apartment, soon to be a lovely luxury master suite, complete with huge closet, giant bathroom with soaker tub, shower ... and an office/study/yoga space/sitting room/nursery attached to the main space. 

It's got such lovely high ceilings. Once we've doubled the window sizes and put in our skylights - the master suite will be flooded with light. I am thrilled with our plans for this area. You can see a bit of the light coming through the existing window here....

A diamond in the rough, for sure. But just wait - a few months = transformation! 

Those Finishing Touches

One of the questions we are asked all the time .... "How long does a typical renovation take?" Our answer is always "it depends".

It depends on what you are doing, where you are going (always best if you move out ...but if you can't just understand it will take longer), how much you are spending etc. etc.

But another answer is "depends when you feel comfortable moving back in". There's done and there's done, you know?

Our most recently completed project (wait til you see the real photos .. it turned out SO well) was really quite complete when our clients moved in. They have twin cutie-pie little toddler boys, so wanted to avoid moving into any more chaos than necessary. So, we made sure to do all the little things in advance - the towel racks, the laundry room shelving, the mirrors, the door stoppers, the coatroom hooks. We wanted to make it as move in ready as possible.

But no matter how complete the renovation, there are always some little things that need to be done at the tail end of a project. Those finishing touches can actually sometimes drag on, even for the most well planned and executed projects.

For example, house numbers (aren't these great?): You can get them here: www.numbermyhouse.com - a Canadian company (two brothers from Calgary started it). We ordered these for our clients - they are 16" high. They come with a template and hanging gear. They are lightweight and weather resistant. We think they are fabulous.

And new decks (we had to wait for snow to melt ..  which we were still doing well into April in Ottawa):

And there's always something that goes wrong. In this case, a stair runner was installed the wrong colour (supposed to be a grey-ish blue and if you can believe it the installers tried to convince the homeowner the colour was "kind of grey". Ugh. Our client is anti-brown and never agreed to the colour.) The new one should be in soon.

Some clients (and some home renovation company owners ... ahem...) are so anxious to move into their new space, they move in very early in the "ready" process (some would say too early). For example, when we moved into our current home, I'd say we were only about 85% done. Like, we didn't have a toilet until 5:30 the day we moved in (and we have four bathrooms!).  And while we had a kitchen, we certainly did not have counter tops (we templated for the quartz). We didn't have trim, closets or railings. The first few nights, we all camped out on mattresses in one bedroom.
It felt kinda like this ...

To be fair, by the end of the month, we were done. By Christmas (the next month) we hosted Christmas dinner.

But it was dusty, disruptive and challenging. It's a good thing we know and enjoy our partners in the various trades so much - we spent a LOT of time together. They saw us in our PJ's a lot.  This worked for us (and the temporary rental budget had dried up) but it likely won't for most.

Understanding that there is often still much work after the project is "done" is a critical part of setting expectations around the completion process.

Another ReNew Homes Overhaul

After a long time... we are back to blogging again. (The blogger half of our team - that's me - was on a bit of a hiatus doing some consulting work, which didn't allow for much blogging!)

It's been a busy time. We completed four projects in the past year - including refreshing a charming older home in Rockliffe, a first and third-floor addition and renovation in Westboro and a complete "stud gut" and addition in the Glebe, which we have just finished. More on our Glebe reno in another post, along with some awesome photos.

For now, I am pleased to announce we are back with another overhaul project.

We couldn't get much closer to home with this one.  The long-time owner of the house across the street from ours passed away, which was a sad event for all on our street. Our lovely neighbour, Daisy, was a real treasure to all of us and was always ready with a smile and a wave.  We miss Daisy and her warm family, who we got to know well over the past year. Daisy proudly owned her own home for many, many years, and we can't wait to restore it to its former glory and create a wonderful space for a new family.

The house is not without its' challenges. It still has knob and tube wiring, and because it's an older home, the layout needs to be  refreshed to better suit the needs of a modern family.

Here's the house now ....  with tons of junk sitting outside.

We are currently emptying the house ... (Ok, not "we" but it's getting emptied thanks to Warren, Steve and the goods folks who respond to Kijiji ads).

Bin #1 has already been carried away.

We've found some cool old stuff like this old bottle of "Bay Rum" Mentholated ... good for" insect bites, headaches, face wash and shampoo".

We have some wonderful plans for this home - I think it's going to be beautiful!